Movie review: Zero Dark Thirty

Jessica Chastain playing a member of the elite team of spies and military operatives stationed in a covert base overseas who secretly devoted themselves to finding Osama Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty.

Photograph by: Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.
, Postmedia News

Zero Dark Thirty

4 stars out of five

Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke

Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow

Running time: 157 minutes

Parental guidance: Extreme violence, adult themes

“Zero dark thirty” is military jargon for the darkest time of night: 12:30 a.m. when, on May 2, 2011, U.S. forces stormed the Pakistan compound of Osama bin Laden and assassinated him. “Geronimo,” one of them reported from the raid. “For God and country. Geronimo.”

Darkness likewise envelops Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s amazing motion picture — part movie, part investigative journalism — about the 10-year manhunt for bin Laden. Detainees are tortured (or rather subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” if that’s what you can call being stripped and forced to walk around on all fours on a leash), CIA agents are murdered, political will is tested, tiny clues are obsessively pursued. It takes the better part of three hours to tell this story, and not a minute of it seems wasted.

It stars Jessica Chastain as Maya, a young CIA agent (based on a real woman) who spends her entire career on the case at the expense of a life. It’s an extraordinary performance, all grit and self-control, and while the movie leans ever so slightly towards hagiography — Maya is the voice of relentless focus in a harried bureaucracy of spycraft — it serves the dramatic purpose of giving us someone to follow with the same dedication. As she did in fictionalized bomb-disposal drama The Hurt Locker (both films were written by journalist-screenwriter Mark Boal), Bigelow pulls us into the twilight world of terrorism, betrayal and the sudden shock of violence and it’s a tribute to her art that we’re on the edge of our seats even though we know how it all turns out.

The centrepiece of Zero Dark Thirty is the final hour or so, a re-creation of the Navy SEAL raid on bin Ladin’s walled home in Abbottabad, situated just around the corner from a Pakistani military base. Top-secret Stealth Black Hawk helicopters — their design an apparent good guess by the filmmakers — drop teams of troops whom we watch through a night-vision haze as they blow open doors, set their laser sights on screaming women and scurrying men, and climb the stairs toward their final target. The documentary feeling is all the more amazing when you realize that it happened only 18 months ago: By comparison Argo, another ripped-from-the-headlines political drama, took more than 30 years to get to the screen.

Zero Dark Thirty begins with a black screen and the voices of confusion and fear from 9/11. It then jumps ahead two years to a U.S. “black site” where a hulking CIA agent named Dan (Jason Clarke) is holding Ammar (Reda Kateb, from A Prophet), a captured al Qaeda money man. He’s kept in a shed where he’s tied to the ceiling, beaten, forced to wear a dog collar, stuffed into a tiny airless box and “waterboarded,” a technique that replicates drowning.

Eventually he breaks, and there is a controversy around what some see as an endorsement of torture as a technique for getting valuable information. It has been established that it does not work, but Zero Dark Thirty is somewhat ambiguous about it: Ammar talks only after the torture ends. A more frightening aspect of the film’s darkness is the way in which Maya — present at the interrogations — and Dan seem to emerge with their souls undamaged. If they’re circumspect, it’s for political reasons. “You don’t want to be the last one holding the dog collar when the insight committee comes,” Dan warns Maya, but by then she is battle-hardened.

She spends years trying to track a key bin Laden messenger who might lead them to the terrorist mastermind: As in many movies, it is the cellphone that leads to his lair, and you suspect that if the world’s bad guys could learn to live with pay phones, they would never be caught.

Maya pounces on tiny clues, follows dead ends and withstands the pressure of a CIA boss (Mark Strong) who screams, “Bring me people to kill.” She clashes with her bosses and threatens them with exposure if they don’t let her pursue her obsession. She’s a modern heroine, vanquishing skepticism. When the compound is finally located, she goes to Washington to challenge the political caution of people who have been burned previously — by the “weapons of mass destruction” that were supposed to be in Iraq — and don’t want to move too quickly. When the CIA director (James Gandolfini) asks who she is, she responds, “I’m the m-f- that found the place. Sir.”

It’s a murky trail, however, muddied with side trips into other interrogations, false leads, and the general confusion of half-glimpsed truths. It’s a dirty war, and most of it takes place during the darkest time of night.

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